As the Six-Day War raged on, focusing media attention on the Middle East, Gilles Caron produced his first major report, delivering unique images. With his ability to read the terrain and his understanding of the tactics deployed by the players involved, he followed the events with lucidity and precision to produce a complete overview.

The Six Day War, which broke out on June 5 1967, prompted Gilles Caron to return to the country: he had been there the previous month to document an excursion by the singer Sylvie Vartan, and had already taken care to document certain aspects of the militarisation of the country, for example with a visit to a parachute factory.

The area has been marked by conflict since the end of the Second World War: after the 1948 war between the new State of Israel, whose creation had been approved by the UN, and the neighboring Arab countries, which rejected the decision, and the 1956 war when the Israeli army, together with France and Great Britain, attacked Nasser’s Egypt, the region is in a permanent state of tension and the narrow Jewish territory is still threatened with disappearance.

Worried about the progress of pan-Arab warmongering and the recent creation of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Israel launched a pre-emptive attack on June 5 1967, which ended in a lightning victory on June 10. Described as a blitzkrieg, compared to David’s victory over Goliath, the Six Day War pitted Israel against three of its neighbors: Egypt, Jordan and Syria. All three countries suffered heavy material, territorial and human damage. The Egyptian air force was destroyed on the ground even before Israeli armored vehicles conquered the Sinai. Jordanian forces were defeated in Jerusalem and the West Bank. Syria was forced to abandon the Golan Heights. After the ceasefire imposed by the United States and the USSR, the territory controlled by Israel increased from 21,000 to 102,000 km2, with a million Arab inhabitants now under its administration; in Jordan in particular, thousands of refugees were added to the already large numbers from the 1948 war.

In September 1967, the Arab countries prohibited each other from negotiating with the State of Israel, whose right to exist they did not recognise. In November, UN Security Council Resolution 242 ordered the return of the occupied territories. Over time, Israel evacuated the Sinai, then the Golan Heights and finally the Gaza Strip. However, no lasting agreement was reached on the political status of Jerusalem and the West Bank, leaving the Palestinian population in a situation of de facto oppression.

Gilles Caron, with this first report on an international scale, demonstrated his excellence in the field. Rather than follow the official routes offered to the press by the authorities, he hired a car with a German colleague and travelled quickly, photographing both the vast expanse of the Sinai desert and the dark alleys of the old city of Jerusalem. Gilles Caron recorded almost every aspect of the conflict: from the arrival of Israeli soldiers at the Suez Canal, the arrest of Palestinian civilians and the surrender of enemy soldiers in the Sinai desert, to the scenes of jubilation that brought Israeli soldiers and civilians together under the national flag, he captured the most powerful moments of the Six-Day War.

Very effective in his reading of the ongoing conflict – which comes from his military training as a paratrooper – he was above all the first to follow the Israeli soldiers, led by General Moshe Dayan, Minister of Defence, and the army’s Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren, into the Old City of Jerusalem, then an Arab quarter, at the very moment when they found the Wailing Wall, the holiest site in Judaism. On the night that followed, from 10 to 11 June, the Arab houses surrounding the wall were razed to the ground, freeing the wall and creating the vast esplanade that faces it.

Caron’s report met with strong demand from the press, because it focused on the major aspects of this week-long conflict, and did so with striking images destined to become icons, with immense symbolic power. It is in fact a genuine photographic essay, providing a complete visual account of this blitzkrieg.

1967, Middle East, Israel, Egypt, Sinai Peninsula, West Bank, Jordan, East Jerusalem, Gaza Strip, Syria, war, Six-Day War, Arab-Israeli conflict, violence…